this is my final for my 2023 advanced cinema studies class
Stories We Tell is a piece of cinema in the truest sense. Both art and entertainment, the film captivates its audience with its startling and twisting narrative. Who is being interviewed? Who is Polley’s real father? Who was Diane? Stories We Tell permits its audience to get lost in these questions. However, the film itself does not wish or seek to answer them. Stories We Tell is concerned rather, with the nature of memory, truth, reality, and how trusting, respecting, and documenting such memories on film impacts their very nature. Polley attempts to address these questions by documenting the reality of her mother, Diane, through a democratic approach to reality in which all the memories of those involved in Diane’s life are accepted as the complete truth/reality of Diane despite discrepancies between any specific perceptions or recollections of her existence. Polley, through the rendering of these memories into the mechanically reproducible oral stories that becomes the film Stories We Tell, claims this democratic truth by way of her position to the film as the film’s director and also as the daughter of Diane. She abstracts the message of the film even further, through the use of super-8 footage, to communicate the inherently personal and unique nature of all documentary filmmaking.
Stories We Tell reflects the ideas of Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility both internally, in the movie’s investigation of democratizing constructed reality, and by virtue of its cinematic form. Benjamin details the process in which emotional interpretations of simultaneously occurring realities are expressed by encoding those emotions into objects. These objects become encoded with these emotions through the labor involved in their creation, and through this, become what we understand as art. The plastic art - painting, sculpture, etc. - exists in multiples only when the process of the original is repeated as a manual reproduction; the replica, however, is a different art object entirely. Where the original plastic art interprets and then renders reality through a set of physical/artistic and ideological tools, its replica interprets a rendering of reality and manually reproduces this previously intimately conceived and artistically depicted truth. The replica is a dissociated art object in which the meaning of its structure, though seemingly identical to the original artwork, is changed by the imposition of a secondary experience of reality.
The photographic art can exist in multiples through a process of technological reproduction. Technological reproduction allows for the imprint of reality in a photograph or a film to exist in the imprint’s exact form an innumerable amount of times in as many times and spaces as desired. However, like the plastic arts, the photographic arts’ imprint of reality is rather a depiction of the process of creating a photographic image. Thus, recipients of photographic and cinematic images do not see concrete reality but an artist’s conditional interpretation of truth.
The slight discrepancies between an original painting or sculpture and its manually reproduced object remind the viewer of the labor, and thus of the physical and ideological process, of the individual responsible for the replica’s existence. The art object, then, becomes bound with these processes. The recipient of a plastic art’s manual reproduction soon begins to conceive of all art not as depictions of truth but as material expressions of unique and conditional impressions of concrete reality.
Inversely, mechanical reproduction does not make visible the augmentation of reality inherent in the creation of any artwork. Benjamin writes that “by replicating a work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced” (22). This is why photography and film are often used with fascistic intent. These mediums of pseudorealism (in the Bazinian sense) can manipulate factual material to deceive the viewer into believing that what they witness is truth. This substituting of a mass truth for a unique one is exactly what Polley contends with in Stories We Tell.
There is a moment in the film in which Micheal, Diane’s ex-husband, recalls her behavior around the house following her cancer diagnosis. Micheal recalls Diane attending to the children, cleaning, and caring for him. This memory of Micheal’s is juxtaposed with that of Diane’s children. In the kids’ memories, the cancer diagnosis left Diane distraught. According to her children, they were left without care and the martial gap between Diane and Micheal seemed wider than ever. When the interviewees/family members of Polley were asked if it seemed like Diane was dying, Micheal responded no, whereas the children not only responded yes but remarked that Diane was keenly aware of that fact.
The oral recollections of Micheal versus that of the kids are completely inverse of each other. With no way to account for the feelings and experiences of Diane, Stories We Tell accepts both answers as reality. The film does not question the validity of its interviewees’ memories; it knows memory to hold the qualities of manual reproduction, in that memories are formed through their owner’s interpretation of expressions.
These interviews, however, displace the reality and story of Diane from its medium of memory to the mediums of speech and then cinema. Subsequently, the qualities of such memories, and thus the reality of Diane, are changed. Stories We Tell finds its final form through an “assembl[y of clips] from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the editor” (28). In discarding takes of subjects’ narrations of memories, the editor, Mike Munn, discards some memories themselves. Munn then incorporates his chosen technological reproductions of oral memories into the film’s narrative, which is synonymous with that of Diane, and “in a sense, he establishes [it] as the record” (30). This standard process of editing intervenes with Polley’s/the movie’s goal of a completely democratic reconstruction of Diane through oral history. To accurately investigate the inseparable nature of memory and reality, Polley attempts to make visual this aforementioned process of (re)forming truth through editing and the dislocation of memory from its psychological medium. She does this through the super-8 footage of Rebecca Jenkins, who plays Diane in these sequences of fictionalized archival film-images.
The super-8 footage depicts no specific individual’s telling of the story of Diane. Rather, the footage mirrors the totalizing impacts that technological reproduction has on democratic truth. These sequences are filmed to resemble home movies, yet they feel distant and unfamiliar. This is due to the audience’s inability to decipher who records these videos. The camera often appears to be omniscient. It is revealed at the end of Stories We Tell that these videos are fictional, or at least that they are not archival. From this post-film standpoint, it might be imagined that the super-8 videos are used to represent the perspective of Polley, whose memories are absent from the movie despite her intimate relationship with Diane. However, this is not the case. These videos depict times and spaces in which it would not have been possible for Polley, or any singular person - even Diane - for that matter, to document.
For example, there is a shot that depicts young Micheal, Diane, and two of their children, who are all portrayed here by actors, running into the ocean. Though it is understood that these images are fictionalized reenactments, an expectation of a filmmaker is present. Even in films with fictional narratives, audiences are more or less aware of the camera's point of view as synonymous with the/a person behind it. The same goes for Stories We Tells’ interviews; the audience might not be consistently conscious that the subjects are speaking to them and Polley. Yet, the viewers understand, especially the contemporary viewer because of the popularity of film and the rise in access to filmmaking, that they are witnessing the impositions of points of view of filmmakers onto subjects. There seems to be no one behind the super-8 camera, no specific point of view represented. Polley would not yet have been born, Diane’s other children would have been with her first ex-husband, and the owners of the memories that orally express this moment are all presented as subjects within the image’s frame. The point of view in which this image has been captured through seems not to exist in this juxtaposition of orated memory and reenactment.
In the film, John, Diane’s son, shares his memory of how happy Diane was to be leaving her family in Toronto to go acting in a play in Montreal. John’s oral expression of Diane’s reality is followed by a reenacted shot of Diane in the dressing room of a theater. Shots of Diane and Harry - the extramarital love and purported biological father of Polley - at bars, dinners, parties, walking down the street, etc. through the super-8 camera are underscored by the recounting of Harry’s memory of him courting Diane and their relationship together. A super-8 image of Micheal leaning against a train window is accompanied by the oration of his memory of going alone, by train, to visit Diane while she was in Montreal. Later, as the film reconfigures itself to give expression to the identity of Polley through the excavation of conditional realities of Diane that are seemingly extremely proximate to concrete reality, the super-8 camera lands upon Polley and Harry having a conversation at a cafe. This is the first time that the analog camera makes an image of Stories We Tell’s subjects, rather than actors who play such people. Polley and Harry’s reenactments of their meeting are joined by the voices of Harry and Polley’s siblings recalling this memory.
Each of these aforementioned sequences, their omniscience along with the shots’ unwavering framing, unique shakiness, and other cinematic qualities, defies the conditional, the spatial, the temporal, and the physical. Yet it deceives its audience into thinking that it is communicating concrete reality. Polley’s exposure of the reenacted nature of these images then deceives viewers into believing that they witness reality. The super-8 sequences’ positions between or overlayed upon orations of memory seems to equalize the ability to approximate reality of the reenactments and the interviews. If this is true, it is only because the super-8 footage, as juxtaposed with the interviews, exposes a gap between Diane’s concrete reality and Stories We Tell’s documentation of truth/memory. This distance is obvious in the interviews alone but is realized to be much wider when edited into the film with methods of montage.
Within Polley’s film is a hierarchy of reality formed by individual truth’s proximity to concrete reality. Memory, history, reality, an original plastic artwork, and a photo or a film (a technological reproduction) are all truths that are equally distanced from concrete reality. Additionally, each of these truths possesses the capacity to deceive one into believing they are bastions of objectivity, despite subjectivity being inherent to their processes of formation. The reproduction of film/photography is the object itself, however memory/reality/history and plastic arts all undergo manual reproductions in order to find existence outside their original space. The plastic art becomes a replica and the memory/reality, as it is framed within Stories We Tell, becomes expression through oral storytelling. Both the replica and the oral story exist in their specific and particular concrete realities, though these existences are more tangential than uniformly derivative of the original concrete realities that the first derivative (the memory/reality or the original plastic art) documents. From here, the memory which has become a tangential concrete reality as an oral story/interview is captured by Polley’s camera and communicated as Polley’s truth/reality by way of its mechanical reproduction as it is incorporated into the cinematic medium of Stories We Tell.
Stories We Tell masterfully constructs Diane’s reality through its acceptance of all of the memories of Diane as synonymous with her reality. The film presents an effective methodology for ways in which reality is constructed and conceived in the social. This commitment to the democratization of truth, however, is at odds with the inherent nature of documentary cinema. Stories We Tell’s method of constructing the reality of Diane would be best utilized in strictly interpersonal modes of communication. However, when the method is brought to film, it is absorbed into two hierarchies: one being the hierarchy of reality formed by individual truth’s proximity to concrete reality, the other being the well known social hierarchy formed by the power a filmmaker has over a film’s subjects. This process supplants, as conceived by Benjamin, mass/democratic reality, the subject’s memories of Diane, for a unique one, Polley’s interpretations of her subjects’ stories which become realized through her film.
Memory is additionally at odds with documentary cinema because memory possesses an inherent nature of subjectivity to the personal, temporal, and spatial conditions of the person who retains such interpretation of concrete reality. Cinema freezes memory in the time and space in which it is documented. Thus, the inherently subjective nature of memory, one of the reasons why it is such a good way to democratize the conception of reality, is abolished by these particular truths’ confrontation with film. Additionally, in order to document such truth, cinema requires memory to forgo its psychological medium for an oral one, which in turn constructs a tangential concrete reality which is the oral/auditory relaying of memory. Stories We Tell’s camera captures this tangential concrete reality, but it cannot communicate such inaccessible reality to the film’s audience. Within this tangential concrete reality is the truth of Diane, but that too is inaccessible because of its psychological medium. Yet, the film does effectively communicate a reality which is synonymous with Polley’s interpretations of the film’s oral stories. This is a result of the film production hierarchy which positions a film’s audience as more proximate to a director, and thus to the point of view of Polley, than to a film’s subjects, who in this case communicate the reality of Diane through their verbalization of memory.
Throughout the final sequences of Stories We Tell, Polley deliberately exposes the artifice of cinema through the visual exposition of her position behind the super-8 cameras. These moments serve as a meta-commentary on the layered reality constructed within the film. By revealing herself as the orchestrator of these cinematic elements, Polley emphasizes her role in shaping the audience's perception of the various realities presented. The juxtaposition of her behind-the-scenes presence and the film's content underlines the power dynamics inherent in storytelling, shedding light on how filmmakers can influence the audience's interpretation of truth through the manipulation of visual and narrative elements.
Stories We Tell’s intricate interplay between memory, reality, and cinema unravels a profound truth: all documentary cinema inherently becomes a personal narrative. The very nature of memory, bound by subjectivity and temporal conditions, undergoes a transformative process when translated to film. While concrete reality remains perpetually elusive, cinema becomes a medium through which personal truths are expressed and shaped. The power dynamics within documentary filmmaking amplify this personal narrative, emphasizing that the most influential storyteller, the one with the greatest control over the film, guides the audience’s perception of reality. The pursuit of realism in documentary cinema intertwines with the intimate relationship between the filmmaker, their subject, and the elusive nature of truth.
